Coaxial cable television systems have been in widespread use for many years and extensive networks have been developed. The extensive and complex networks are often difficult for a cable operator to manage and monitor. A typical cable network generally contains a headend which includes a cable modem termination system (CMTS). The CMTS contains several receivers, each receiver connects to one or more nodes which are connected to network elements (cable modems, MTAs, etc) of many subscribers, e.g., a single receiver may be connected to hundreds of modems which vary widely in communication characteristics. In many instances several nodes may serve a particular area of a town or city. The CMTS is also usually connected to an IP network from which it obtains content from various sources including the internet, and voice networks. The network elements communicate to the CMTS via upstream communications on a dedicated band of frequency and receive information from the CMTS via downstream communications.
Cable networks are also increasingly carrying signals which require a high quality and reliability of service, such as voice communications or Voice over IP (VoIP) communications. Any disruption of voice or data traffic is a great inconvenience and often unacceptable to a subscriber.
Logical channel operation is a mechanism whereby multiple upstream channels may be configured with different operating parameters while all operating on the same physical channel. DOCSIS 2.0 introduced this concept to support simultaneous operation and therefore backwards compatibility of TDMA, ATDMA, and SCDMA cable modems.
Existing technologies within CMTSs or network management applications do not currently provide a mechanism to differentiate modems and reassigned them to leverage any grouping benefits. If such a technology did exist, it will be limited to physical channel (not logical channel) isolation and therefore would not offer much in the way of benefits as the number of physical channels is a very limited commodity. It is only with the recent creation of logical channels in the DOCSIS 2.0 specification that such benefits have manifested themselves. Current CMTS implementations for configuring logical channels are manual processes where a unique command must generally be entered for each cable modem registered on the system. With a CMTS typically servicing over 20,000 cable modems, clearly no operators are utilizing any such feature. Further, there is no current product offering that provides the operator a mechanism for grouping these modems.